Suture

By Nic Brewer

To make her films, Eva must take out her eyes and use them as batteries. To make her art, Finn must cut open her chest and remove her lungs and heart. To write her novels, Grace must use her blood to power the word processor.

Suture shares three interweaving stories of artists tearing themselves open to make art. Each artist baffles their family, or harms their loved ones, with their necessary sacrifices. Eva's wife worries about her mental health; Finn's teenager follows in her footsteps, using forearms bones for drumsticks; Grace's network constantly worries about the prolific writer's penchant for self-harm, and the over-use of her vitals for art.

The result is a hyper-real exploration of the cruelties we commit and forgive in ourselves and others. Brewer brings a unique perspective to mental illness while exploring how support systems in relationships—spousal, parental, familial—can be both helpful and damaging.

This exciting debut novel is a highly original meditation on the fractures within us, and the importance of empathy as medicine and glue.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bookhug Press
• Release date: Sep 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781771667036

Book preview

Teal and green textured background with a rent down the book from the top left to the bottom right

Praise for Suture

"Suture is Nic Brewer’s transgressively taut storytelling. The notes in these pages write desire, connection and art from the body’s vivid capacity for tenderness where the hard stuff tears. A nimble, fearless debut."

Canisia Lubrin,

author of The Dyzgraphxst

"Suture is a daring, visceral debut that examines the painful side of the creative process. Blending body horror with meditations on love, art, and forgiveness, this novel will startle and captivate you."

Catriona Wright,

author of Difficult People

I read this book with wonder — Brewer’s confident prose swept me along. Hers is sure, sharp writing that doesn’t flinch from tenderness. I felt this book in my body. I ached (in my heart and bones, along an old, spidery scar that split my chest in two) long after I set it down. What a privilege to read this work.

Gillian Wigmore,

author of Glory

Suture

Title page: Suture by Nic Brewer. Published by Book*hug Press, Toronto 2021

copyright © 2021 by Nic Brewer

ALL

RIGHTS

RESERVED

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Suture / Nic Brewer.

Names: Brewer, Nic, author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2021025985

X

| Canadiana (ebook) 20210259892

ISBN

9781771667029 (softcover)

ISBN

9781771667036 (

EPUB

)

ISBN

9781771667043 (

PDF

)

Classification:

LCC

PS

8603.R74 S88 2021 |

DDC

C

813/.6 — dc23

The production of this book was made possible through the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Book*hug Press also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Book Fund.

Logo: Canada Council for the Arts Logo: Ontario Arts Council

Logo: Government of Canada Logo: Ontario Creates

Book*hug Press acknowledges that the land on which we operate is the traditional territory of many nations, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples. We recognize the enduring presence of many diverse First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples and are grateful for the opportunity to meet, work, and learn on this territory.

For Tab,

and for anyone who needs it.

I love you.

A map of your journey

The women were three storeys tall and the police were trying to shatter the crowd. They couldn’t find the projector. So these twenty-foot-tall cunts and bushes played the whole time, right on the side of the station. The baton sticks so appropriately phallic while these ghostly Amazonian women sat naked and read police reports to each other over a pot of peppermint tea. Some days I hate that that’s my legacy: cunts and bushes and a blushing riot. Imagine, your edgy undergrad thesis haunting you for the rest of your career. I love it, I love what we did . . . but I wish it didn’t show up on every list of great feminist film projects. They have all been feminist, you know? Not just the one with naked giantesses.

A woman falls in love with women.

My right eye was still in the camera when they arrested me. They knocked off the eye patch when they pushed me into the back — you should have seen it. Have you? An empty eye socket? It’s disgusting. Everyone thinks it’s going to be black, but they don’t remember the blood. It crusts under the eye patch after a while, this ring of scabby brown right where your makeup would smudge. Clumping the eyelashes. And the eyelid sags dreadfully, with the extra weight of the blood, the eyelashes. Into the concavity, a little wrinkly, too soft without the eye there to support it. But if you lift it up out of the way, the inside is more white than anything. A slick white with smears of the brightest red. Not like when you bleed; brighter. Almost translucent. Shiny. It’s not dark at all in the socket — it’s eerily light. Light and wet.

A woman falls in love with injustice.

People started yelling cunt at me everywhere I went. It felt like I had accomplished something.

A woman falls in love with rage.

I learned to fight after the third time someone tried to take my eyes.

A woman falls in love with justice.

My aunt’s best friend gave me her son’s camera for my thirteenth birthday, but she didn’t tell me how to use it. She didn’t tell me anything. Her son had killed himself at film school a few months earlier, and how do you tell someone that? Maybe the way I just told you, or maybe you hand over a used $3,000 video camera and say careful, honey, and sorry we don’t have the box anymore, and you let the memory harden just a little bit more and you hope it doesn’t happen again. This was before the internet, remember. There was nowhere for me to go to learn how to use a real camera. But there was a movie being filmed just around the corner from my friend’s house that summer, and I snuck onto the set every day to try to catch the directors in the act. Eventually I saw them, calmly popping their eyes into their palms, slipping them into their cameras; there was a lot more blood when I tried it.

A woman falls in love with potential.

I went blind for the first time shortly after I had finally mastered taking my eyes out and getting them back in. Now I was ready to use the camera, I thought. But cameras are custom made, and this one was custom made for a dead kid. I shoved my eyes into the battery slot and started filming. I pointed it ahead of me and turned in a circle in the middle of my room. A crushing pain in the back of my head cut the adventure short, my view dark around the edges and getting darker. When I took my eyes out of the camera, they were smaller, wrinkled, almost dented in places. And when I put them back into my own sockets, I couldn’t see anything but a soft, borderless grey. Shapes appeared after an hour, blurry and greyscale, sharpening slowly; I didn’t move the entire time. Colour took a day or two to come back. My perception was off for a week. As soon as it was all back to normal, I tried again.

A woman falls in love with beauty.

The longest I ever went without my eyes was three days. I hoped maybe I would die. When I didn’t, when I put them back in and could still see, I shook it forever — that itch to know if death might be better. No matter how meaningless it was, at least it was in vivid colour.

A woman falls in love with a woman.

Colour went first. I could still see everything when my eyes were in a camera — for a while — but once they were back in my head it was greyscale. It happens, from time to time, so I waited a few days, and then a few weeks, and then I realized it wasn’t coming back and I disappeared for ten days. I gave away all the art in my apartment, all my furniture, painted my walls white, ordered a whole new apartment from

IKEA

online in white and grey and black-brown. I asked my wife to buy me grey and black sweaters, shawls, dresses. If I was seeing in greyscale, I was living in greyscale. I almost lost everything. My next films weren’t black and white because of some artistic vision, although I liked that people thought so. They were in black and white because I didn’t know how long my eyes would still be able to film in colour.

A woman falls in love with a life.

It was all more painful than I could ever have imagined. No fool thinks ripping their eyes out will be painless, but I suppose we are all just foolish enough.

A woman falls in love with loss.

I could use the camera for about six months after I went completely blind. Maybe it would have lasted longer if I’d been more responsible; I’ll never know. I don’t really care. Once I lost sight altogether and the only way to see was by filming, I filmed constantly. That documentary, as they ended up calling it, was for nobody except myself.

A woman falls in love with grief.

They couldn’t decide how to arrest me. That’s the trick: be sure to rebel naked, and they will be afraid to touch you. Forty years later and my cunts were off causing trouble again, that goddamn clip playing on the sides of buildings all over the city. Being Eva Hudson-Smith has its advantages; people will do most things for you, if you ask. And my very own cunt front and centre this time, my soft and folded body, everything I had ever been told to shut up about. Blood on my face, blood on my hands, eyes back on the bedstand, my naked ass walking blind across the Ambassador Bridge. But how do you arrest a famous, naked, blind old woman?

A woman falls in love with her past.

We are so loud. Loud and fragrant. We betray ourselves: too much cologne, not enough soap, fresh lipstick, rustling clothes, tapping feet. There is so much more to us than we would like to admit. I can hear how people’s lips move when they talk. I can hear if they are talking with their hands. If